Plato was suspicious of writing even lol

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

I feel like the authors of many non-fiction books (e.g. business, self-help) are told that they must write a 320 page book, even if the core is, at most twenty, pages. I guess it needs to look plump on the shelf at the airport or something. Dale Carnegie got a lot across in a small number of pages. Today he’d have to do 320 pages or maybe even two books one on making friends and one influencing people. I wouldn’t mind paying for the book if there was a way to get the wheat without the chaff. I’ve seen various book summary apps but I’d rather get it straight from the author minus 300 pages of filler.

It's always surprising how many HN readers seem to read only non-fiction, sometimes only self-help style books about business and startups. Some are even proud of that.

Yes, I was referencing the concept defined by that book, it was extremely prophetic.

You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.

All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the same as in the decades after. Inventions that massively altered entire societies within a human lifespan of their invention are pretty new. Maybe somebody more familiar with the history of technology can correct me, but I can’t think of anything like that before the steam engine.

> There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill.

Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.

> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?

Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?

Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.

> I disagree with this take so strongly

You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.

If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.

If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.

America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.

In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)

Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.

> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.

AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.

As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.

Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?

But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.

And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.

Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.

The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?